1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns obtaining temporary exclusive control of printing devices. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems in which a recipient obtains control of a printer, either by being authenticated or in the absence of authentication. After the recipient gains control, the printer appears “busy” for other printer requests and the recipient can select print jobs to print, including selecting print jobs over a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
When printing print jobs to a printer, once the print jobs are printed out, a recipient must go to the printer in order to retrieve the hardcopy printout. Often, upon arriving at the printer to retrieve his printout, the recipient discovers that his hardcopy printout is not there. This may be because the recipient's print job is still pending in the print queue behind other print jobs, or because the print job may have been accidentally or intentionally taken by someone else. A similar problem arises with regard to facsimile transmissions. To address this problem, systems have been contemplated that defer printing a print job or a facsimile transmission until the recipient is present at the printer/facsimile.
One method of deferring printing of a facsimile transmission is known with regard to a Canon Laser Class 7000/7500 facsimile machine. This facsimile machine defers printing a transmission received by the facsimile machine by storing the transmission in a confidential electronic mailbox. The data is held in the mailbox until a person having the proper mailbox code arrives at the facsimile machine and enters the proper code to retrieve the data from the mailbox. Once the proper mailbox code has been entered, the transmission is printed by the facsimile machine.
One method of deferring printing in printers is to require recipient authentication in order for the print job to be printed. Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/411,665 entitled “Authenticated Secure Printing”, filed Oct. 4, 1999, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference into the subject application as if set forth herein in full, describes a method of requiring recipient authentication in order to print secure documents. Briefly, the application describes a method where a user provides unique identification information that is submitted with a print job to a print node. Upon receiving the print job and unique identification information, the print node encrypts the print job and stores it in a secure manner. In order to retrieve the secure print job from the printer, a person having the proper authentication information provides this information to the printer, whereby the printer processes and prints out the print job.
Another method of deferring printing of a document until receiving recipient authentication has been described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,633,932 to Davis et al. According to the patent, a print job and a header are sent to a print node in encrypted format. If the document is considered to be “sensitive”, then an indication that the document is sensitive is placed in an electronic header identifying the document as sensitive. Upon receiving the encrypted document and header, the print node decrypts the header to determine if the document is sensitive; if so, the document is stored until the print node receives authentication from the recipient. Thereafter, the “sensitive” document is printed.
The foregoing methods provide a way to defer printing until receiving authentication of the recipient. However, none of these methods addresses the further control of printing operations after the recipient has been authenticated. More particularly, in each of the foregoing methods, after the recipient has been authenticated, all print jobs pending in the print queue before the recipient's print job continue to print in the order they were received by the queue. Accordingly, the recipient has to wait until other print jobs pending before his are printed before his print job is printed. Moreover, the authenticated recipient is not able to select a print job to print from among those pending in the queue. Additionally, if the recipient submits a print job after he has been authenticated, he may have to be authenticated again in order for the newly submitted print jobs to print. Further, the recipient is only able to print print jobs that have been received by the queue and is not able to manually access a remote storage location and download a print job to print.
Additional concerns arise with regard to accurate accounting of resources used in printing operations, such as the amount and type of paper used and the amount of ink used. In more detail, accurate accounting of resources may be desired in order to bill a particular department within an office or a particular person using the resources. Accounting is most commonly accomplished by software in a print server that tracks print jobs based on who submitted the print job. However, this accounting method does not accurately reflect the actual recipient who is using the resources, but only identifies the sender or sending department. This becomes particularly apparent where one department such as an accounting department, requests that another department such as an engineering department, send it a copy of a document. In this case, the sender (engineering) would be billed for resources whereas the recipient (accounting) is actually using the resources. As a result, the sender is billed for resources that they are not using.